Album Review: Bike Thief

Stuck in a Dream (Self-Released)

[POP DEPENDENCE] Considering the album title is almost an
Alice Cooper reference and the band’s name is cribbed from a postwar,
neo-realist film, it’d be reasonable to expect a rich tapestry of
culture on Bike Thief’s Stuck in a Dream. Instead, the album the
Portland five-piece turned in is a milquetoast approximation of whatever
passes for indie rock these days.

Febian Perez, a Rhode
Island native and brief Austinite, whispers his way through the album’s
10 tracks, backed by keys, strings and a swell of backup singers. It’s a
thoroughly devised and expertly executed piece of work, just one
lacking in genuine hooks and ruthless, creative passion. “We Once Knew,”
which features Luz Mendoza contributing vocals, accidentally
approximates the guitar of Television’s “Prove It.” A fuzzed-up
six-string solo emerges toward the end, a bit too late to save it from
the doldrums. A few songs deeper, “The Burning Past” opens with some fey
xylophone before heading into another slight rock offering, pushed to
the brink by a slew of pregnant pauses and posh strings.

There’s a disconcerting dependence on busy compositional finery that disallows Stuck in a Dream
from being a collection of music that anyone is likely to revisit—and
not every pop track needs to be four minutes long. Tempos being largely
unchanged track to track contribute to the overwhelming feeling of
sameness. That, though, might also simply be chalked up to members of
Bike Thief being so certain of themselves that they’ve settled on a
specific set of restrictive dynamics they’re unwilling to deviate from.
It’s difficult to find technical fault with anything that Perez and his
troupe turn in here, but that’s mostly due to all of it being framed
within expectations of a genre and a clutch of influences that’s been
sterilized and codified since the new millennium.